Shall I lie beside you and tell you what it was?
It doesn’t matter. Blaming myself like this gives me something to get over, something easier than her death which I can never get over. Get over it; as though it were a boulder in the way. It is an event in life and in so much as I have life I take it with me. Her death in my saddle bags. The Book of my Mother.
In the antiseptic world we try to purge ourselves of difficult things. Don’t dwell on it, switch the light off and go home. But this is home. I have to be a home to myself. I am the place I come back to and I can’t keep hiding difficult things in trunks. Soon the house will be full of trunks and I perched on top with the phone saying ‘Yes, I’m fine, of course I’m fine, everything’s fine.’ The trunks shudder.
I have a grand house but it’s not home. I am home. My veins, belly and bone. My mind, the odd attic room where everything is kept. But I don’t want to be a man with only one storey. I would rather be an Arabian Night, a thousand and one rooms at my disposal, places to wander, green groves, yes, but, too, a Bluebeard’s Chamber where the key is not forbidden. Darkness as well as light. Or do I mean darkness, another kind of light? Lucifer would say so, and I have a weakness for fallen angels.
Of course I do; the priest adores the sin. No sin no priest. The doctor needs the wound. Fallen creatures thrive on gravity; that which pulls us down is the spur that raises us up. Materialists and spiritualists alike seem to me to have missed the point; as long as we are human we are both. After death one side or the other will be right but presently, and presently is all we have, we are both.
Am I a Centaur? Half man, half beast, horsey flanks and nacrous hooves, my chest raised up to draw a bow? The Centaur, symbol of the true nature of humanity, marred by the wild passions of the brute. And yet it was a Centaur, Chiron, a son of Saturn who trained Aesculapius in the art of medicine. Since then medicine has become a science and we no longer ask advice from horses.
Am I a Centaur? Hooves that thud/thud thud/thud the wood and an unsheathed cock? An unsheathed cock and God in my chest. Is that the dilemma, the tragic combination? The Greeks have held it so, though for subtly different reasons to ours, where a body-loathing, woman-despising Church has found it convenient to place all that is sinful in the excesses of the flesh and all that is right in the restraint of the spirit. Look again.
Is appetite excess of feeling or lack of it? The glutton is not a gourmand. The alcoholic does not love fine wine any more than the womaniser loves women. Don Giovanni; the unsheathed cock is layered to numbness. He might as well stick it in a hole in the wall for all the pleasure it gives him. Sex gives him no pleasure, only power and violence please him, that is not the mark of the brute, it is the mark of Man.
When I say I lack feeling, you know that I mean I lack the capacity to feel, and that is a spiritual not a bodily failing. Would I had the excess of Mozart, spilling out every day into new chords of beauty, excess of spirit, David’s dance before the Ark of the Covenant, that embarrassed his wife and his people, but delighted the God of Israel, who does not stint and hates it in others.
If I needed any proof that sexual sins are failures of feeling and that it is that failure and that failure alone that makes them both sinful and punishable, I can read the story of David and Bathsheba, perhaps the most famous and the most misunderstood adultery in the world.
It happened, late one afternoon, when David arose from his couch and was walking upon the roof of his house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing, and the woman was very beautiful. And David sent and inquired about this woman. And one said, ‘Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?’ So David sent messengers and took her; and she came to him and he lay with her. Then she returned to her house. And the woman conceived and she sent and told David, ‘I am with child.’
So David sent word to Joab saying, ‘Send me Uriah the Hittite.’ Then David said to Uriah, ‘Go down to your house and wash your feet.’ And Uriah went out of the king’s house and there followed him a present from the king. But Uriah slept at the door of the king’s house with all the servants of his lord and did not go down to his house.
David said, ‘Have you not come from a journey? Why did you not go down to your house?’
Uriah said to David, ‘The ark, and Israel, and Judah dwell in booths and my lord Joab and the servants of my lord are camping in the open field; shall I then go to my house to eat and to drink and to lie with my wife? As you live and as your soul lives, I will not do this thing.’ Then David said to Uriah, ‘Remain here today also and tomorrow I will let you depart.’ So Uriah remained in Jerusalem that day and the next. And David invited him and he ate in his presence and drank so that he made him drunk; and in the evening he went out to lie on his couch with the servants of his lord but he did not go down to his house. In the morning David sent a note to Joab and sent it by the hand of Uriah, ‘Set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting and then draw back from him that he may be struck down and die.’ And as Joab was besieging the city he assigned Uriah to the place where he knew there were valiant men, and some of the servants of David fell. Uriah the Hittite was slain also.
When the wife of Uriah heard that Uriah her husband was dead she made lamentation for her husband. And when the mourning was over David sent and brought her to his house and she became his wife and bore him a son. But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.
And the Lord sent Nathan to David. He came to him and said to him ‘There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor. The rich man had very many flocks and herds but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb which he had bought. And he brought it up and it grew up with him and with his children; it used to eat of his morsel and drink of his cup and lie in his bosom and it was like a daughter to him. Now there came a traveller to the rich man and he was unwilling to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the wayfarer, but he took the poor man’s lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him.’
Then David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man and he said to Nathan ‘As the Lord lives the man who has done this deserves to die and he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing and because he had no pity.’
Nathan said to David ‘You are the man.’
(2 Samuel, II and 12:1–7).
‘Because he had no pity.’ The punishable sin is not lust, not even adultery, the sin is not to do with sex at all. It is a failure of feeling. Not an excess of passion but a lack of compassion.
*
I did once suggest this reading to my Bishop. He accused me of being a Communist, a Heretic, a lecher and a Women’s Libber, and I imagined for myself a hell where red flames were stoked with white brassières. I remember that he kept goldfish, and when he died, he left all his fortune to their upkeep and wellbeing. We were living in São Paulo at the time, and he had an illuminated text over his pantry: ‘The poor are always with you. (Matt. 26:11)’
He particularly disliked the Miracle of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, although whether this was in fear for his pantry, or out of deference to his goldfish, I never found out. I do know that when the poor fainted at the church door, there were neither loaves nor fishes to revive them. But the Bishop was a spiritual man and not a Centaur like me.
D.H. Lawrence once described himself as a Centaur, except that he muddled up his nether parts, claiming that he had a poet’s brain and a bull’s balls. A man less bull-like, it is difficult to imagine, unless we include Toulouse-Lautrec. I can usually forgive Lawrence for his muddles large and small, the matter of his balls is a small one, but his imago-mythology is faulty. In Lawrence’s hands, the Centaur, with his unsheathed cock and God in his chest, becomes the Man-beast, with God in his cock and an unsheathed chest. Medallion man meets the Divine Phallus. When I look about the streets, I can see that this is a problem. And I don’t want to be a pedant, but surely a phallus is only divine when it is strapped on to a god? Does the g
od make the phallus or does the phallus make the god?
From heaven the spear-light vertical in its fewter. The well-aimed light and the dark heart. The light at rest against the heart. Light surgery for cardiac arrest. The operation of light upon the heart is simple; the aortic valves open like trumpets, a brassy euphonic of high C driving the blood through tunnels, red rush of pleasure, excitement, energy of feeling that focuses the retina out of its cloudy illusion. Blood behind the eyes; sacred wash that unfilms the blurred vision of the half-hearted world.
Light. An electromagnetic radiation that produces visual sensation.
Heart. The organ that circulates the blood.
Any more to say?
The heart in its dark pen recognises the light. Knows the light again and struggles for it after long hibernation. The hibernating heart, not awake, not asleep, but suspended out of light, dreams of it. Why shield myself from that which I desire? Why do I fear what I love?
Under the door I can see the yellow band that presages a Midas world struck gold. Not rigid metal but vibrating light, unfiltered, unsullied, uncontained. I fear it, fear to open the door, take off my spectacles and with nothing in between give in to the light. There is no portion, either I do or I do not.
Could I be a light-hearted man?
Core to core. Light to light. I am made of light, empty space and points of light, the atomic composition of the seeming solid. Why am I more comfortable with the seeming than the real? The counterfeit of sofas and stocks and shares? The measurement of the cultivated man. Not too much, not too much, not too much. Much. And if that is not enough, more, more life into a time without boundaries.
I, Handel, doctor, priest, society wiseman, fool, find myself on this anonymous train that wheezes towards the sea. I have money, a passport, luggage, a warm coat. Will that be enough? Enough of a skin to wrap myself in while I shed what had been my life.
My life. What should have been an Ode to Reason has become a few Fescennine verses …
What do you call a doctor who removes the wrong breast?
I don’t know. What do you call a doctor who removes the wrong breast?
A surgeon.
Of course there has been an inquiry. The lady in question is still recovering from her second operation, this time to remove the right breast (in fact the left). I should not have performed the operation at all, it was an emergency, the duty surgeon had been taken ill, there was no-one else, and I am the best in my field. The best lack all conviction … and the worst? What do you think the worst would have done? Taken the other one off, straight away, under the anaesthetic and called the botch a complication. Surely they wouldn’t do that, would they?
I had resigned myself to being struck off. I, Handel, not doctor, not priest, society laughing stock, fool. Is my reputation worth her breast? Weigh them in the balances and will you find me wanting? Her breast, that any man could fondle for a fiver, should be worth more than thirty years of my life? She was a prostitute. A prostitute. And why did she come to enjoy the doubtful benefits of the most exclusive breast cancer expert in Britain? Why? He works for a charity, Handel does, a little unfunded hospital for nobodies, his bounty, one day a month.
What do you think of the rhetoric? It is my barrister’s own. When he heard the brief he said ‘God, you were lucky, what if she had been one of your private patients?’
‘What difference does it make?’
‘She’s a tart. You won’t be struck off for a tart’s tit. We might even manage compensation from the press. Cheer up.’
Of course. I need not have worried. That she was low and that I let her down lower still is not a matter for concern. She is a streetwalker. I am a knight. Sir Handel. My QC is a knight too. Sir Claude. Two knights, no longer rescuing ladies from impossible towers, nowadays we rescue ourselves and are paid for it. Sir Claude is very expensive. He earned more out of her breast in a fortnight than she collected in her entire career.
‘What was she?’ he said over his cappuccino. ‘Fifty-two? Fifty-three ’
I nodded.
‘Ha, ha, bit late for her to claim loss of earnings isn’t it? I daresay you can’t have done much asset stripping there.’
‘No Claude, it wasn’t much of a breast.’
‘Well, there you are then, cheer up.’
Shame. Unusual for a Catholic to feel shame. Guilt is our ticket. Guilt to confess, guilt to expiate, guilt, good riddance and gone. The priest understands that. Shame comes from an older and different moral sense, where the wrong-doer does not fear punishment, either in this world or the next, but fears that shrinking up of self, the loss that any small, mean, dirty or stupid act, charges to the soul. If I cheat another, I cheat myself out of the person that I could be. If I wound another, I will eventually find the cut recalled to my own heart. There is no appropriate confession, only the will not to fail again so readily, perhaps because while failure can be forgiven it cannot be excused.
For much of my life I have not been a compassionate man. The awful weight of other people’s miseries, other people’s burdens, in me, twisted into a rope plied of pity, rage and helplessness. I have found, do find it difficult to look on the lot of human kind. I feel sorry and I force myself to use what skills and position I have to ameliorate what I can. But I can’t forgive the squalor of it all. I can’t accept that better food, better education, better hours, better days, whatever those things mean to the fervent, would make any difference. Most of my acquaintances are well-fed, well educated, like their work and have leisure. I would rather spend an evening with a dripping tap.
There are exceptions, but there are exceptions in every situation, every class, and I don’t only mean those revolting Victorian supermodels like Little Nell and Little Dorrit, both of whom would have forgiven me at once for removing either or both of their breasts, and in Little Nell’s case, without anaesthetic. There must be a terrible hell somewhere for thugs and torturers, a hell unthought of by Dante, where the Two Littles line up with Puccini’s Mimi and Madam Butterfly, Donna Anna in the corner, Saint Agatha supervising, and reduce vile men to weeping supplicants, simply by taking martyrdom to its conclusion; an inhumanity far beyond that of the brutes.
Am I a brute? The newspapers think so: CALLOUS DOC IN BREAST FARCE.
So many years ago, if I stretch out my fingers now, will I touch her again? Blood-stained fingers, the man behind the mask breathing sterilised air, his mouth covered so that when he leans over he will not infect you. His lips are above your cheek but he won’t kiss you. Your eyes were closed waiting for him to kiss you. He straightened his back.
The woman on the white slab, the woman on the frosted ground. The woman who trusted him with her breasts, who took his long fingers and put them on her breasts, eight cool knives on her warm breasts. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
‘Stop apologising Handel, you don’t have to make love to me.’
Under general anaesthetic the patient can hear everything.
The man on the train had fainted. The light struck his cheeks but did not revive him. He heard voices from afar off, calling, calling through the thick air …
‘When you grow up Handel, you must do some good in the world.’
‘Sins of the flesh or sins of conscience?’
‘Did you ejaculate into this woman?’
‘You don’t have to make love to me.’
The voices bound his hands and feet in golden bandages. He was mummified in the dead air, he must breathe, he must breathe but the cloths were at his nostrils and soaked in honey. Honeyed words, hadn’t he said them? The rational man with the musical voice, ‘There’s nothing to worry about. Nothing to fear, go on, get dressed.’
His flesh, naked before her mirror, the boys waiting to be gelded in the stalls.
Someone else’s flesh, naked before him, the taut brown nipple under the whorl of his finger.
The light in railings around his body. He couldn’t slip between. The light had staked him out. He must answer,
not with gilded lips now, but tongues of flame.
SAPPHO
THE DOLL was a woman of fortune. Fortune in her dress, Fortune on the gilded wheels of her coach, Fortune in the hangings, drapes, pots and porcelain from inside the Everlasting Wall. Her china came through Holland, in the private barrels of a lover who was Imperial. Thus she had what the King of England had not; porcelain. But tonight, in the brumous winter and the charcoal streets, it was not the tiny bowls and tea dishes for which she silently blessed her yellow wag. As a token of love, half in earnest, half in jest, he had given her an occult piece, exquisite, transparent, strong, decorated with lewd lovers in blue relief. It was this she wore on its leather strap and it comforted her. Any straying hand would find its expectancy. She shifted it slightly as she swung into The Cock and Gun.
(Sappho wrote in the margin of the page: ‘Where can I get one of these?’)
The strawed floor. The gouged benches. The smoke fire roasting the pig. Where was Ruggiero?
A boy had a sailor beautifully unbuttoned, and to her surprise, the Doll felt her porcelain swell, she took hold of it. A man smiled at her and gestured to the Backs. She shook her head. Where was Ruggiero? She pushed between a pair of petticoats, unloosed from both hips, had she seen …? Had she seen? When she got to the fire, the man with the tongs on his lover’s nipples, was not her love. She had been mistaken. Where was Ruggiero? She stood back and pondered the Chase. Why such a rush to the hills when any man could enjoy any valley he fancied?
She drank. She waited. She was hungry but she could not eat. The men playing Piss the Fire had pissed the pig. He steamed in ammonia clouds.
She sighed. She waited. All for love? Where was Ruggiero? Hadn’t she had them raw from the womb? Hadn’t she taught her strapling boys to put in their hands after honeycomb? Hadn’t she taken them in their gowns and mortar boards and coaxed them to put aside the set square for the pleasure of the compass? She had shown them how to take a point and expand a circle around it. She had been a proper Columbus to their undiscovered coasts. She had mapped them, schooled savages, no matter how simple the tool. They were logged up in her little book under their individual coordinates. She liked to remember a man by his dimensions. Not only the length, but also the width, and distance travelled. She had been a charitable and an accommodating Doll. Scientific, certainly, and rational in all her pursuits, but with that love of music and verse that she felt Newton lacked. He used to come to her, when she had first advertised her credentials, and he often brought an apple which he never ate. He said it had fallen on his head, and he gazed at it with all the wonder of a soothsayer into a globe. Poor man, very often she distracted him, but it was to the apple he returned.